Philip George Chadwick, with introduction by Brian Aldiss, The Death Guard (London: Penguin 1982).
I bought this a few weeks after reading about it online. It was first published in 1939, although according to Wikipedia Chadwick probably started writing it in 1919 after the First World War. Very little is known about Chadwick himself, though the brief author biography at the end of the novel states that he was born in 1893, the youngest son of a North Country family. He wrote a number of short stories for newspapers and magazines in the ’20s and ’30s, as well as poetry. He lived for a while in Brighton, where he raised a family and was known as a articulate and talented political speaker, first for the Fabians and then as an Independent MP. He died in 1955.
The description of the book as ‘underground’ suggests that it was somehow officially banned. This wasn’t the case. It appears to have had a limited print run, and all but one copy seems to have been destroyed during the Blitz. It was long believed to have been lost completely, and perhaps even mythical, despite being referred to several times by no less than H.G. Wells. It was then rediscovered and republished by Penguin when they were trying to launch the RoC imprint of SF and Fantasy novels.
What makes the book fascinating to me is that it appears to be one of the earliest future war novels in which the menace is from genetically engineered warriors, somewhat like the armies clones used by the Empire in Star Wars, or the replicants in Blade Runner. In Chadwick’s vision, however, they are a form of artificial life that develops from a chemical soup into things like worms, before transforming into something like tadpoles then becoming humanoid. The creatures, simply dubbed ‘the Flesh’, or ‘units’ are pure slabs of muscle, with every other biological aspect pared down to the bare minimum. Instead of eyes, they have sockets of photosensitive skin. They breathe through their mouths, which has a membrane at the back through which they absorb air and their food, a mess of biologically engineered nutrients of the same type from which they are spawned, called ketchup. They have no intelligence or individuality. They exist purely to march and kill. Their creators equip them with helmets, a pair of spikes on either side of their bodies to make them even more efficient killers, metal shoes that make their feet rather like pig’s trotters, and a type of spear with four blades, dubbed a quadrifane. They are almost unkillable, and even when apparently dead, their biological substance lives on. It sprouts vesicles containing immature versions of the flesh, neoblasts, which then erupt to attack and kill in their turn. And the ketchup itself, unless consumed or destroyed, will also spawn more of the monsters.
The Origins of the Guard
These creatures are the products of Goble, a recently demobbed World War I soldier waiting with other former troopers for transport back to the demob centres and civilian life. Goble is haunted by an incident during the War, when he accidentally kills a fellow British trooper while on sentry duty. The man was too terrified to utter the password, and mistaking his inarticulate mumbling for that of an enemy, Goble killed him. He states, bitterly, that he didn’t want to be a soldier and become a killing machine. He is a former scientist, who with his supervisor, Dax, was engaged on a project to create life. It was during the War that he formulates the idea of the Death Guard, sketching out their appearance and equipment. Biological machines to do the fighting that humans wouldn’t.
Goble is discovered by Edom Beldite, a semi-retired industrialist seeking new projects to occupy his time. driving past Goble as he waits for transport back home. Beldite is fascinated by him, picks him up in his car, and takes him back to his country house, where Goble becomes a friend of the family, which includes his grandson Gregory Beldite, and the junior Beldite’s aunt, Fertile. Goble describes his killing of the other British squaddie and reveals his and Dax’s work on creating artificial life. Edom Beldite is fascinated by this, taking it up as a new hobby and converting the house’s stables into laboratories. This is the household environment in which the young Beldite grows up. The novel is framed as Beldite’s history of the war with the continental powers resulting from Beldite’s and Goble’s creatures, in which his personal memoirs as a significant participant in the events and ensuing war are an important part.
The Book’s Description of the Britain of the Late 20th Century
Despite initial official disapproval – at one point the laboratories and their staff have to be hidden from an inspection by the authorities – the experiments become an important but carefully hidden part of Beldite industries. Europe is bound by a series of international disarmament regulations which restrict the manufacture of weapons and technologies that may be used for war. This alternative future – the book is set in the 1970s – has autogyros and aircraft, but they are gliders launched from giant catapults. Other devices include the televisor, a sort of television. Not only can people watch it at home, they also do so in halls like cinemas. The broadcasting equipment is two way, so that politicians and political speakers using it to address the British public are able to view their audience and take stock of how well their speeches are going. It has been said that much Science Fiction reflects the time it was written, not the future, and this is the case with The Flesh Guard. Brighton is an entertainment resort, and people go to dance halls, not discos or nightclubs, and the Prime Minister wears a frock coat. It is also a Britain of grinding working class poverty and mass disaffection. There are militant pacifist groups plotting revolution and political censorship. When the leading pacifist spokesman attempts to address the nation on the threat of the Flesh Guard through the televisor, the authorities turn the sound off before dragging him away.
Racism and Black Subordination
It also reflects the racism of the time. The actual work of manufacture is done by the Experts, low-class, semi-educated Whites with brutal tastes. These centre around women, gambling, and staging ‘red try-outs’ – gladiatorial combats between members of the Guard, as well as their killing of cattle. After the infant creatures have been produced – dubbed at this stage ‘pugs’ – they are given over to Black workers to wash the chemicals from which they were spawned off them. These workers are described as ‘nigs’ or ‘ni**ers’. They are portrayed as simple minded, but potentially rebellious and bloodthirsty. In order to prevent them turning on their White employers and then the wider White community when they are relocated to Britain, they are kept in line with a false religion. This extols the White man, in the form of Edom Beldite, Dax, and a third leader in the manufacture of the Guard, as the creator of the Black race as well. The Flesh Guard are believed by the Black workers to be their brothers, and have instilled in them the doctrine that the Guard was deliberately created to protect Black people. This indoctrination is hammered into them through the ‘Glory Service’, held every evening in which attendance is mandatory.
As the manufacture of the Flesh becomes a part of Beldite’s industrial concerns and no longer a hobby, it is moved to Africa and a part of the Congo, under the guise of a subsidiary specialising in a new form of producing rubber. At the same time, the Guard draws the attention of Vessant, the smooth and scheming minister for war. Vessant sees them as a new weapon, an invincible army that will prevent and fight off any attempt by the continent to invade Britain. He therefore arranges with Beldite to increase production. Secret factories and depots are established throughout Yorkshire and the north. The ketchup that feeds the bioengineered hordes is disguised as ‘artificial food’. Gregory Beldite grows up, and takes up boxing and gliding as his hobbies. His uncle moves to Brighton, and it is there that his aunt Fertile introduces him to Paddy Hassall, the book’s heroine. Moving back to Yorkshire, Gregory Beldite joins the workforce at one of the Flesh factories, though as a ‘mugger’, a labourer running around serving the Experts, rather than management. One of the office workers is a member of the pacifist underground, and later introduces Beldite junior to his comrades at a political meeting in town. This gives the novel a quasi-working class viewpoint, even though young Beldite is a scion of the propertied classes.
Massacres by the Flesh in Africa
The Experts are restless for their old bloodsports, and so arrange a red try-out, whose victim is to be a cow they’ve managed to purchase. Only the Experts and muggers like Beldite are to know about this, not the office staff. This becomes a scene of carnage when one of the office women bursts in on them, wondering what it’s all about. The Unit at the centre of bullfight turns and kills her, and carries on killing the other personnel who futilely attempt to save her life. Back in Africa similar events have occurred. The Flesh escape from the Beldite compound to massacre the local African village leaving no one, not even a White missionary, alive. The Belgian authorities are outraged, as is much of the continent. They demand an immediate investigate of the Beldite compound. The Beldite company refuses and won’t allow them entry unless they are allowed to leave taking all their research and instruments with them. The Belgians therefore send an armed force against them, which is repulsed by the Flesh Guard. They are totally massacred, and the unleashed Guard goes on to butcher the British radio journalist and his crew secretly covering the events, which are broadcast live on the national news.
War with the Continent
The continental powers, fearing invasion and subjugation by Britain, join together in an alliance to invade. Even though they have been bound by the same international treaties, weapons research and manufacture has gone on secretly on their side as well. Their weapons include types of gas. One of these completely surrounds its target with murky black, preventing them from seeing the enemy. Another type, described as electric, destroys the functioning of machines as well as killing humans. This type of gas doesn’t disperse, but remains as a largely unseen toxic presence to kill the unwary travelling through the battle zones. The continental forces also have dominance of the air. There are giant motherships, flying aircraft carriers, transporting the Bomb Pluggers, sleek, streamlined dive bombers operated electronically by their pilots and which follow pre-programmed routs. The British navy is completely destroyed and the air force ruthlessly decimated. The continentals invade, but the British unleash the Death Guard, who mercilessly beat them back.
This does not end the war. The continentals embark on a bombing campaign, first against the Flesh factories, and then against the transport network and the towns and civilians centres. Order begins to break down. The government arranges the evacuation of civilians from the towns, and then shipments by air of food. Large areas of the country become impassable due to the destruction of the roads, the lingering gas and the neoblasts erupting from the parental Flesh seeking victims. Revolution breaks out in several parts of the north, as starvation and abandonment by the authorities to the bombing takes its toll. Roaming the devastated towns and countryside are the Mercy Gangs, volunteers who provide emergency medical aid to the wounded who can be saved, and euthanasian to those that can’t. Effective control of the country contracts to London and Brighton, an important place for the politicians and military leaders to unwind. As the war goes on, everything above ground is levelled and London’s people left to the assaults of the continental bombers. The really important personnel and equipment is moved hundreds of feet underground, where factories have been set up to produce a Flesh invasion force that will be transferred to the continent on rocketgliders to wreak death and destruction there.
After attending secret pacifist meetings, Gregory Beldite is conscripted into a special force of Experts charged with exterminating escaped Flesh and the neoblasts, during which his convoy is attacked by bombers, leaving him as the only survivor. He escapes, and makes his way across country, going to his old family home of View to meet his ailing uncle and persuade him to do something to stop the War. Beldite senior, however, lives in a hotel suite in Brighton along with Aunt Fertile. He is old, and sick, and while he wishes to stop the war, he is utterly sidelined by Vessant and the government. Haggard, one of his fellow Experts, goes down there with a message from Gregory telling them that he is now determined to do everything he can to stop the bloodshed. Haggard believes he is dead, but Paddy Hassall resolves to find him and forces Haggard to take her up north. Doing so they struggle with impassable roads, starving crowds who riot and try to attack them when they see Haggard’s Experts’ uniform. Finally their car is wrecked and Haggard killed protecting Paddy from a mass of attacking neoblasts. She struggles on alone, escaping the attention of a farmer, who forces her to attend to his wife in childbirth, but who clearly has other plans for her. Gregory Beldite eventually finds the view, but is shot and wounded by two unknown gunmen. There is no food or water in the house, so he starves while sustaining himself drinking its wine store. A crashed bombplugger at the side of the house offers him the opportunity of escape, but before he can use it, it is totally wrecked and himself nearly killed by a Flesh Unit. He seeks to escape and join a passing pacifist march, but he is shot again by the unseen shooters and the march killed by a continental air attack. Lying awaiting death, he is discovered by a Mercy Gang, recognised and then sent back south to recuperate.
He and Paddy become guests of Vessant and his wife at his country house. Vessant knows this is scheduled by the continentals to be destroyed the following day, but is going to abandon it and move to the underground warrens in London, there to preside over the Flesh counterattack and invasion of the continent. He takes Gregory Beldite, who has inherited ownership of Beldite from his uncle, who has since died, as well as the other remaining company directors. Once there, Gregory Beldite sees how far advanced the preparations are, and wonders if it is too late to stop it. The rocketgliders are hidden in silos hidden underneath buildings on the surface. The are blown up to open the silos beneath. Two columns of the Flesh Guard are marched to their waiting craft, which are then catapulted across the Channel to begin their murderous work.
Beldite Seizes Power to End the War
This is interrupted by a revolt from the Black workers, The Experts rush to Vessant’s command centre in panic, during which one of Vessant’s goons shoots one of the loyal Blacks, who had dropped to his hands and knees to plea for peaceful treatment. Gregory is also shot, but is dragged out by the other Experts, who kill Vessant and everyone in the room with him with one of the gas guns they use on the Flesh. Beldite then takes control of the situations, and in a coup seizes power in the government and company. He arranges a truce between Britain and the head of the continental forces, who descends to meet him in his mothership. Beldite has promised the British public victory, which doesn’t go down too well with the French commander. Nothing but complete surrender will satisfy the continentals, not even if Beldite stops a further invasion of the continent. Beldite then plays his last hand. One of his fellow directors, whom Beldite despises for his mercenary money-grubbing attitude, has repeatedly urged Beldite to sell the secrets of Flesh production to the various individual continental countries. They are businessmen, after all, and not in the business of war. Beldite tells the commander that if peace is not agreed upon, he will sell the secret to the individual nations of the alliance. They will immediately become mutually suspicious, and turn on each other, just as the alliance has turned on Britain. The Flesh will rampage across Europe and then the world. But to show the commander his good faith about British disarmament, he asks the Frenchman to look out the window. There, the remaining Flesh are being marched down the streets to their incineration by fire amidst cheering crowds attacking them with anything they can. This persuades the commander and the leaders of the alliance. Peace is declared. Beldite and Paddy are married and the work of reconstruction begins.
A Reflection of Interwar Britain
Chadwick was clearly drawing on the events and political situation of his own time. It reflects the tensions in interwar Britain, with pacifist societies and working class unrest. The seizure of power by revolutionaries in a number of northern towns seems to me to be based on the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the collapse of central authorities and the seizure of power by local revolutionary councils in Germany and Austria after their defeat in World War I. The descriptions of combat, the disgust of troopers forced to watch it and the cynical attitude to the crowds cheering the Experts and other soldiers as heroes, strikes me very much as coming from a man who really did see combat and all its horrors. At one point, Beldite and Haggard are rescued from a destroyed observation post by a cheerful airman, charged with carrying food to the surviving population. Beldite looks down on him as inexperienced, someone who has only seen the war from the air.
The description of the grinding poverty of sections of the working class, and the conduct of their political meetings, also has the ring of authenticity.
Racism, Colonialism and a Black Fascist SF Writer
Contemporary readers, however, may be put off by the racism towards the Black workers. I think this reflects not just the attitude of the time, but also possibly more specifically that some colonials. The Experts may be based on some of the rough, low class Whites, given jobs above the Black workers in colonial society. And the distrust of Black Africans as potentially violent and murderous probably comes from racial tensions during the late 19th century phase of imperial expansion. As for the creation of a false religion to keep them in line, this plot device was used by a Fascist Black American writer in the 1930s. This individual published a novel in which a Black American superscientist takes over the leadership of Africa and its Black population to wage a genocidal war against White Europeans. In order to give Blacks the necessary moral and spiritual strength for their struggle, he creates a giant Black android to pose as their new god during religious services established to inculcate the superiority of the Black race and the urgency of the struggle against Whites.
Similarities to The Day of the Triffids and Stalker
The book is interesting for several reasons. It’s a cracking good story in itself, and the passages of Beldite’s, Haggard’s and Hassall’s travel through a devastated Britain reminded me Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and its depiction of a ruined Britain threatened by another set of creatures, which may also have been biologically manufactured and which have also escaped human control. The hidden hazards of the devastated zones, such as the lingering gas, also reminded me of the Strugatsky’s Stalker, whose hero also navigates his way through a treacherous zone with hidden traps, though one that may have been created by material from an alien spaceship rather than a human war. It’s also interesting for its 1930s vision of a future Britain, which is pretty much like 1930s Britain but with advanced technology. Some of the predictions for this technology are very inaccurate, like the motherships, although there were experiments with them by some air forces. The planes are all propeller driven, so there are no jets, and mass air travel seems to be gliders launched from catapults. The televisor is shown in halls like a development of the cinema rather than rival to it.
Science and Artificial Life
The creation of the Flesh itself seems to come from contemporary scientific speculation, in particularly the vitalism of philosopher’s like Henri Bergson. Goble at one point explains that life is inherent in matter, and it is only a case in some ways of freeing it. This is before the discovery of DNA and the more recent findings of biochemistry, which have shown how intricate and complex the chemistry of biological life really is. Scientists are engaged in creating analogies of biological cells from non-organic matter. This has been discussed by the Russian science vlogger, Anton Petrov, but it will be something like a thousand years before humanity will be able to make anything like one of Blade Runner’s Replicants.
Conclusion: A Forgotten Masterpiece
But it does show the horrors of war, and the threat of uncontrolled scientific advances used for military purposes, a threat not just to Britain, but also to Europe and global civilisation. This is SF as the literature of warning. In one incident, the continent sends war robots into Britain to fight the Flesh, which defeats them. We are nearing such an international situation now, with the development of real war robots, unmanned drones and tanks. For all its faults, I think the vividness of its writing, its creative imagination of a future war and its machines and its realistic depiction of working class politics and militancy makes the book well worth reading and, indeed, an SF masterpiece.
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